Diamonds in days

I started in wine.

I thought I understood patience back then—vintages, decanting, letting a bottle breathe like it was alive. I spoke the language of sommeliers and soil. Wine gave me my first taste of time in a bottle… and it made me a snob.

Then I fell for rum.

Rum doesn’t ask for permission. It’s sugar and funk, pirates and tropical storms. Joy with a knife behind its back. And in rum, I found freedom… no pretense, no waiting, just fun that somehow tasted like history when you dug deep enough into the agricole and the black molasses. Maybe it saved me from being a snob.

Bourbon was my minor.

A sweeter, more polite education. America in a glass—hopeful, golden, a little loud. It showed me comfort, but never mystery. It taught me to be brash and not to apologize.

And then… Cognac.

Cognac is the Beatles to everyone else’s Oasis. The elder sibling who doesn’t care what year it is, because It's accomplishments are generational. It’s plank time is measured in decades; months and years mean nothing. It moves in cathedral quiet. Cognac doesn’t intoxicate—it invites. Intoxication is vulgar; seduction is the point.

But here’s the problem: I’m Gen X.

I am built for shortcuts. I want my movies on demand, my groceries on the porch, my dopamine one click away. I know we can make diamonds in days and whiskey in weeks. I demand to skip the line.

And so we build roadmaps to compress time.

We pulse spirits with ultrasound to hammer alcohol into oak pores. We cycle heat and pressure to mimic seasons in hours. We micro‑dose oxygen to coax young ethanol into round, forgiving esters. We storm the gates.

This is Phase One of the new alchemy: extraction and mimicry. We can make a three‑year spirit in weeks, at least to the eye and tongue of someone who’s not paying close attention.

Phase Two will be chemistry in dialogue with AI.

Pressurized reactors that inhale and exhale like artificial barrels. Sensors tracking esters, fusel oils, oxygen. Catalysts that know when to stop. Spirits that grow old like a time‑lapse of a flower blooming. Technology overwhelming the olfactory.

And one day, we will have Phase Three—the diamond reactor for liquor.

A system that can take white distillate and return it, thirty days later, as something that smells like a blend of golden eau de vie decades in old oak and tastes like Louis XIII. Tech‑matured Cognac, bourbon, and rum… perfect and repeatable.

And yet… Cognac still makes me wait.

Even knowing the tricks, even knowing the roadmap, there’s a part of me that wants to stand in line. To wait my turn. Because some things can’t be compressed—not really. The molecules can be hurried, the esters persuaded, the alcohol softened. But the experience… the gravity of Cognac… the cathedral of time… still demands reverence. I've smelt where cognac lives. The dry, the wet celers, all the secret places where demijohns locked in red wax and string call home.

Cognac has a long history of tricks. It really only started as a tax dodge. A wish to reconstitute back into wine with little water. Fools and Masters in lock step. That is Grand Cognac. Mistake after mistake. Landed cognacs in English Riverside warehouses. All the worst and best parts of alchemy. It's a mistake and all golden none the less.

So I sip. I slow down. I let the old brandy remind me that for all my Gen X shortcuts, some things earn their meaning only in decades.

Cognac is the last teacher I can’t fast‑forward through.

And that

, I suspect, is why it still owns me. Time is its own terroir.